McCain's version of the Benghazi answer

By Alexander Burns

10/18/12 11:24 AM EDT

The exchange between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on Benghazi was probably Romney's weakest moment of the debate Tuesday night — one that Mike Allen calls a "get-out-of-jail free card" for Obama on Libya. Rather than delivering a big-picture critique of Obama's approach to Libya and his response to the violence there last month, Romney homed in on Obama's Sept. 12 Rose Garden statement and claimed incorrectly that Obama hadn't used the words "terror" or "terrorism."

During an interview on CNN last night, Anderson Cooper asked Arizona Sen. John McCain whether Romney missed an opportunity by fixating on the Rose Garden statement. McCain answered in the affirmative and proceeded to deliver a version of the Libya critique that Romney could have offered Tuesday:

I think so, in a way, he did because I think that when you look at the president’s Rose Garden statement, that it really wasn’t talking about that act. And the reason why I don’t think he was: because he later went on “The View,” went on Letterman and others and kept repeating what they had sent his UN ambassador out to say, and say this was a hateful video that triggered this demonstration, or we don’t know what caused it. We knew – we knew within hours, Anderson, that this was a coordinated attack with heavy weapons and we now know that one of the leaders of one of the Al Qaeda-related groups was even there. It was obvious that this was not a — there was no demonstration whatsoever. And when they keep saying, well we’ll wait until we have a full and complete investigation, some facts are obvious now.

I’d like to mention one other aspect if I could. Back in April and June, there were attacks on the U.S. embassy, one an IED, very serious. The British ambassador was attacked. The British closed their consulate. The Red Cross left. Was the president briefed about the danger there? I don’t expect him to know whether 16 people stayed or went, but shouldn’t he have been briefed about the deteriorating situation in Benghazi, where it was obvious that Al Qaeda were coming in across the border. That’s what we need the question to be: what did the president know and when did he know it and what did he do about it? Obviously not much.

More than a month after the Benghazi debate began, it's still not clear how much voters actually care about the issue. But there's at least an opening for articulate Republican voices to suggest Obama's approach to the country — and the region — has been less than perfect. Romney will get another opportunity to make that case in the foreign policy debate in Florida on Monday, and he'll face considerable pressure to deliver a clearer and more credible message than he did this week.